In November 1973, the New York Dolls came to the UK to play headline shows in Warwick, Leeds, York and London, and to appear on the BBC's Old Grey Whistle Test show.
The Dolls' first visit to the UK one year earlier had ended in tragedy, when drummer Billy Murcia, aged just 21, died in a bath-tub at a west London party, after falling asleep under the influence of Mandrax and champagne. Their return to the UK would change another young life, and play a major part in kickstarting a punk rock revolution in the UK.
In London, the New York quintet were booked to play on consecutive nights at Biba, a huge department store on Kensington High Street. Tickets for the gigs - including a meal in the glamorous West London shop - were priced at £2.50, and teenager David Lett, later better known to the world as Dave Vanian, frontman of The Damned, snapped up two for the first night, November 26, one for himself, and one for his girlfriend.
"Biba was a strange place – a shop with five floors of 1930s glamour that felt like a timewarp," Vanian recalls in a new interview with The Guardian. "The gig was full of all sorts of glittering people – a very dressed-up gig. Lots of cross-dressers wandering around."
"I had a girlfriend who came to see the Dolls with me," the singer remembered in a 2018 interview with MOJO's Pat Gilbert. "She was wearing a see-through top with no bra, pretty risqué for the time. She looked stunning."
In The Guardian, Vanian describes the gig as "a pivotal point in history".
"They weren’t great virtuoso players, but they were as good as any band around," he tells writer Michael Hann. "That night they played most of that first album and it sounded really good: if it had sounded like a shambles I don’t think I would have liked it as much. They had one foot firmly in those early rock’n’roll songs: you might only know a few notes, but if you play with passion, it works."
"At that time I wasn’t thinking of being a singer," Vanian adds, "but they made me think I could do it. There was a moment where I thought: I’m not going to be in the audience, I’m going to be on that stage."
On the day following their first Biba gig, the Dolls performed on the Old Grey Whistle Test. You can watch that performance below:
